The best children’s books of 2025

This year’s standout works for children include joyous picture books, gloriously bizarre nonfiction and stories of courage, companionship and rapturous flight – testament to the human need for connection, justice and freedom.

In picture books, Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, the author-illustrator team behind We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, collaborate again on the exuberant Oh Dear, Look What I Got! (Walker), in which a shopping trip is beset by rhyming errors (a parrot for a carrot, a snake for a cake). It all results in an ever more despairing refrain: “Do I want that? No I do not!” Oxenbury’s joyfully expressive huddles of animal and human characters heighten the sense of mayhem in this bouncy, cumulative delight, boasting all the ingredients of a perennial read-aloud favourite.

More seriously, Annie Booker’s The Great Bear (Two Hoots) is a lyrical, haunting story of the polar bear spirit that protects the oceans, and the human greed that threatens their rich life. This beautiful debut is both urgent and hopeful, its trailing kelp and luminous green waters contrasting vividly with black-smudge smoke and the choking cables of crammed fishing nets.

Rashmi Sirdeshpande’s This Is Who I Am (Andersen), illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane, is a moving celebration of identity, at once softly gorgeous and fierce. A child born of immigrant parents, with “a foot in two worlds”, is both “little fingers strumming a guitar / and the sweet notes of the sitar”; she is the strength to overcome racist resistance, and the “courage and patience” of freedom fighters; she is “every page of our shared history”.

Another poetic, uplifting illustrated book for 5+ is Firefly (Magic Cat) by Robert Macfarlane and Luke Adam Hawker. Hawker’s densely textured images blaze even in black and white, as Macfarlane’s stirring verse guides the reader on a metaphorical journey through winter darkness to a dream field illuminated by fireflies, and onwards through supernovae in a blinding resurgence of light and hope (“Become vast, radiant, incandescent”).

In nonfiction for 6+, the entrancing Omnibird by Giselle Clarkson (Gecko) is no straightforward ornithological guide. Looking at 18 species through an original, humorous lens, it shows their characteristics – chicken feathers “the shade of apricot jam”, penguins with “secretly a very long neck” – in ways that prompt young readers to see birds as complex, funny, everyday miracles.

There’s more surreal comedy in Neill Cameron’s Donut Squad: Take Over the World!, which will thrill comics fans from eight to adult with its deep-fried pastries out for global domination. Join Sprinkles, the brave leader with no secret agenda (honest), “unconventional” Spronky, who fills shoes with mackerel, oozing Jammyboi, Anxiety Donut and more in the Squad’s battles against the bellicose, sugar-hating Bagels. With panels packed with anarchic humour, unexpected trivia and candy-coloured absurdity, it is impossible not to devour this in a sitting.

In the high fantasy realm, The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury), second in the Impossible Creatures series, returns its readers to the Archipelago, where Anya, fugitive granddaughter of a murdered king, joins forces with Christopher, guardian of the Archipelago’s mythical animals, in a quest for justice and the origins of a mysterious poison. Enthralling adventures – a sphinx-back rescue, a harpy-guarded library, a glimpse of a terrifying future – ensue, while characteristically humorous, elegant prose exhorts the reader to defend the frail and precious, remembering that “love is the greatest weapon against the world’s cruelties”.

Also from Bloomsbury, Katya Balen’s Letters from the Upside follows Con, who has grown steadily more angry and isolated since his father left – until his neighbour Mr Williams shows him the homing pigeons on the roof. Con sends out airborne messages hoping for word of his dad in this poignant, soaring contemporary story, celebrating, like Rundell, the joy of caring for living creatures, forging new connections and learning to grow beyond rage and despair.

The much-loved Emma Carroll makes a departure from historical fiction in Dracula & Daughters (Faber), set in a town with a longstanding dread of vampires. When cousins Mina, Buffy and Bella discover their connection to Dracula, they uncover an ability that may allow them to heal the undead in this allusive, gothic thrill ride through a deliciously creepy, atmospheric literary landscape. First in a series that’s sure to hook 9+ readers who enjoy feminist fantasy, it may well prove a gateway drug to Victorian classics.

There’s more superb historical fantasy in Deep Dark: A Cassia Thorne Mystery by Zohra Nabi, a compelling journey into the shadows of 19th-century London. Uprooted from her Lucknow home, Cassia Thorne sleeps in the Fleet prison with her debt-laden father; by day, though, she’s free to sell news ballads and compose her own. Hearing rumours of disappearing children, Cassia and her friend Felix team up with Teo the pickpocket to investigate, following secretive business interests to discover a terrifying beast trapped at the heart of the City. This tense, evocative mystery combines nuanced characterisation and transporting period detail with a laser focus on social injustice.